


In Perpetuity

by DictionaryWrites, Johannes_Evans



Series: Magic Beholden [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Immortality, Immortals, M/M, Magical Realism, Modern Era, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Original Mythology, Overstimulation, Power Dynamics, Powerlessness, Urban Fantasy, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 10:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25469152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johannes_Evans/pseuds/Johannes_Evans
Summary: To them, the modern word is all at once too loud, too fragrant, and too full, and yet two men - even two vampires - cannot exist in isolation forever.Ship is something like...Ancient Vampire Living In Isolation Due To Sensory Overload/His Loyal Retainer Who Is The Bridge Between Him And The Outside World.
Relationships: Marcellus (OC)/Genesius (OC)
Series: Magic Beholden [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1844758
Comments: 17
Kudos: 39
Collections: Magic Beholden





	In Perpetuity

I fancied, with some sighing displeasure at the dreariness of the task, that the boarding over the bathroom window would soon have to be replaced, as the wood seemed threatening to splinter in places, and might soon let some sunlight eke through. It was some time past noon, and I turned my gaze from the window’s neatly placed boards to the figure of my master in his bath, his head reclined on the pillow of a towel at the bath’s head. It was a beautiful bath, easily large enough for two my master’s size despite his height and his broad form, and beneath the clear water, I saw the wonderful expanse of his skin, a sort of burnished bronze colour that I had tried, time and time again, to find the pair of in nature, a task I failed each time, owing perhaps to my too-stringent need for perfection in accomplishing it.

His eyes were closed, and his hair lay about him in the water like the swaying arms of some exotic creature below seas. It was thickly dark and in possession of, when dry, a delicate wave to its locks that was only attainable with some long hours’ attention to it: now, it surrounded him like a black halo.

The sight of it, even now, invoked in me a recollection of my youth: a dam had been broken far upriver, flooding a plain and making of it a lake near to my schoolhouse, and when I had dived into the water with some of the other boys at my heels (for I was ever a faster swimmer than they), I had seen the old weeping willow with her many branches swaying up about her head, as if she were dancing for joy at the newness, the strangeness, of her watery surroundings. How beautiful the old tree had looked, still with each of our initials cruelly carved into the bark near her root, and dappled with sunlight that swam, as we did, down through the water to greet her.

Was it still there, that willow tree? Did she dance, now, and take delight in her own radiance, and that of the water submerging her?

Like as not.

The thing was no doubt rotted now by the passing years, as any thing that once lived in ebullience or despondency in those years, barring happily – or regrettably, if you are of a maudlin turn of mind – myself.

Turning his head, Genesius looked at me, and in his eyes, which were the deep, violet-brown of a wine-stained bottle cork, I saw some manner of quiet reluctance, his lips retaining a thin line, a frown of some quiet melancholy.

“Something troubles you?” I asked softly – I always employed a soft voice in the lofty bathroom, I knew not why. Something about the way that my voice tended so to echo, bouncing from the tiled floor and the wood-panelled walls to come back to my own ears left me cold, and I sought to avoid it as much as possible.

“I miss you when you are gone from me, Marcellus. That’s all.”

“I won’t be long,” I said quietly. “Merely a few days. And I’ll bring back more books.”

“Oh, books,” he said, without enthusiasm, and he turned his head to look at the wall before he dipped his head beneath the water. I restrained myself from sighing, as I knew this mood would pass as always it did – he would hear such a thing in any case, well I knew, even with the water serving to buffer the sound – and I stood from my chair, moving to collect a towel from the neat rail at the other side of the room.

When he rose from his bath, rosewater clinging pleasantly to his skin and misting the air with its sweet fragrance, I ministered to him with my usual care, gently towelling off his arms, his torso, his legs. He looked at me with his sadness pulling down his lips as I knelt before him, gently drying each of his feet.

“I do,” he said, his voice a low rumble, heavy with the gravity he sought to impart. “Miss you, that is. You needn’t treat my feelings as mere dramatics.”

“I do not,” I promised him, and dried the moisture from his calves. Were I not a coward, perhaps I might have leaned in, and brushed my lips against the soft, rounded skin at his knee, or bowed my head further and kissed his feet. Were I not a coward, and instead a brave man, I might have been otherwise, and have done all manner of things – then again, were I not a man at all, and instead a duck, the very same might be said.

I dressed him in a favourite suit of his, the trousers worn by years of use and so soft as to glide over his hairless legs – he disdained hair where he found it on any part of his limbs, and he shaved it away with great prejudice, often taking great pains over the labour for hours, when the time for such things once more arose. The blouse was wine-red, with a ruffled collar, and he wore his waistcoat, but declined a jacket. He would hardly be entertaining, and I saw no reason to needle him beyond his shirtsleeves: instead, I sat cross-legged at his back when he perched upon the edge of the bed, and began to comb through his hair.

It was tremendously long, coming down to his mid back, and although he regularly threatened to cut it all down to the root, he never did. I could not remember the last time I had seen him with hair that did not reach his shoulders, so rarely did he take up a shortened style, even when such things were fashionable: he had told me, once, that he liked the weight of it on his scalp, and moreover, that he enjoyed our shared ritual when it came to its combing.

I, too, had a great affection for the daily task, although I should hardly demand of my master that he keep his great mane for my sake alone. There was something so wonderfully calming about it, sitting at his shoulder and drawing the comb slowly through the deeply brown locks, seeking out tangles and convincing them to take up their lodgings on some other fellow’s head, then parting out the sections and braiding them to my master’s preference.

Today, he requested merely a simple three-section braid, and I took to it with my usual care and devotion.

“What say you to music before I go?” I asked him, and he looked at me, his expression unchanging.

I so hated it when he fell into these subdued and desolate moods, as he did at times, sometimes for weeks at once – they were not self-pitying, or overly self-concerned, in my view, merely that he so despised the nature of his affliction, and at times could not help but despair over the nature of his gaoler, keeping him so constrained to the house. I remembered, well I remembered with a pang in my heart, how bright and full of smiles he had been once upon a time, socialising with everyone we met, telling jokes, hearing stories, laughing, singing… And to look at him now, so alone, and so apart from all that he would love, if only he were able? It cut at me.

“I would not say no,” he said, and his lips came to a small, sad smile. Taking him by his hand, I led him up the stairs and to the music room. It was a lofty room making up what had once been the little house’s attic, high of ceiling and with a varnished parquet patterning the wooden floor, with shelves set against the walls. I know not how many instruments we had, although were I to ask Genesius, I have no doubt he could have named every one: he so liked music, and I wished, not for the first time, that I might introduce him to it as it was heard by those outside our little enclave together.

I closed my eyes, setting out my hands, and I heard his light footsteps upon the floor as he moved about the room, first this way and then the other… When he came close to me, I expected an instrument to be laid into my outstretched palms, but no such weight was allotted me, and instead he took me by my hands and drew me forth. To the piano, perhaps, or to the cello?

No: to the harp.

“I am no great harpist,” I reminded him quietly.

“You play angelically,” he replied.

“Devilishly.”

“Perhaps, but well,” he said, with his characteristic stubbornness, and I put my fingers to the strings.

I know not for how long I played, but he watched me intently the whole of the time, drawn up on another stool to lean forward on his knees, his gaze upon my hands, his lips slightly parted. Now and then, he would let his eyelids fall shut, and he would tilt his head to the side, as if to allow the music to better wash over him. I know not what I even played: I forgot as soon as the melody danced from beneath my fingers, for my mind was full up with him, so tranquil did he seem, so handsome was his figure.

“I must go,” I said, when my fingers finally ceased their movements of the strings.

He said nothing, for a long moment, and then, languishingly, “You needn’t go just yet.”

“There isn’t enough to eat for both of us, not for longer than a day or two.”

“I could fast,” he said.

“I would not have you go hungry.”

“And yet you would have me hunger for your presence?”

“A hunger of the soul won’t impart the maladies a hunger of the body will.”

“So easily do you say these things,” he said, “when it is not your hunger you speak of.”

“I must go,” I said again.

This time, Genesius did not reply at all: he merely stood from me and walked out, and I heard his footsteps rapidly descend the stair, that he might be away from me as quickly as he could. He would secrete himself, now, with his books and his solitude, and pretend not to hear me if I called my farewells to him.

Not allowing my pain to show, I walked down to my bedroom on the floor below, and hastily drew on my coat. The cottage was not so large as houses we had once stayed within, merely with the bedroom, the library, a sitting room and kitchen downstairs, and of course, the music room we had made of the attic – I took the bedroom, and he took for his the two-storey library that dominated the south-facing side of the house, sleeping in a sheet hung from the rafters as he had in the old days, sailing from one place to the next. I wondered, in a sort of humdrum, vague way, if we would ever sail again, but then shook myself of the thought, and reached for my shoes.

It was not in his nature to sleep in the night time and wake in the day, but he always did, when he knew I would be leaving him for a time. Resigned as I had been to not seeing him until I returned, I startled to find him on the mat, holding his arms to his chest as if to cradle himself, and he looked at me in the dim, warm glow from the oil lamp over the door.

“You mustn’t stay with me,” he said, “if you feel stifled by me. I should hate to feel I am urging you onto decay.”

“You aren’t,” I said. “I don’t know what I would do, were I to take my leave of you, or you of I.”

“But don’t you miss it?” he said, with urgency that surprised me, his eyes wide and purple where they caught the light. “Don’t you miss those people, those nights of revelry, all the trappings of life outside this cocoon we fester in?”

“Not, I think, as you do,” I said gently, and he collapsed, falling hard against my breast. I caught him awkwardly: I had thought myself tall in my day, but he was taller even than I by nearly a head, and the position forced him to bend over at the waist like some sort of strange device, made to be folded for convenience. He did not sob, but I felt his shoulders shake, and I laid my hands upon his back, inhaling the rosewater scent that clung to his still drying hair.

“You must leave,” he said, voice muffled by my overshirt, “if you ever tire of me.”

“I won’t,” I promised him.

“I keep you prisoner here,” he said wretchedly.

“So you do,” I said, my tone light with injected dryness, “I who holds the key to this place, and its connections to the outside world, and all its levers and switches besides.”

“You mustn’t mock it,” he murmured. “I leech from you all.”

“You leech from me naught but what little sadness might catch hold of me, and keep me drowned in contentment.” I stopped my hand from entwining in a loose lock of his hair, let free from the confines of his braid – no doubt he had been playing with it, as was his way in times of anxiety, curling it about one of his fingers – for this would be a gross overstep of our positions, even after such time together. “You forget, sir, as often you do, that I require this isolation as you do.”

“Not so keenly,” he said thickly, his eyes wet with tears. Not for the first time, I wondered what would become of him if I was ever waylaid in my duties, or worse, were I to perish, and quickly pushed the thought aside.

“No,” I allowed, “but keenly enough that I could not do without.”

“Those young things,” he said fitfully, “no doubt they frolic about from dawn ‘til dusk, listening to their bass-thumping music and— and whatever it is they do.”

“No doubt,” I said.

“Do you think it will ever collapse beneath them?” he asked, as he sometimes did. “Do you think we might ever walk in the silence of the night once more?”

“One day,” I said, allowing my hope to bleed from the words – between the two of us, optimism usually fell to me. “Perhaps.”

“You must go,” he said softly. “I shall waylay you no longer.”

“Two days,” I said. “And I will be back. Sooner, if it can be managed.”

He stood straight and cupped my face, looking down at me with a tender gaze, and as ever, I wondered how best this Rubicon might be breached, that I might close the gap between us and brush my cold lips against his, that we might embrace one another, and drink forevermore from the same glass of life.

“You’re too good to me,” he whispered.

“I am only so good as you deserve,” I said, and closed my eyes as he leaned to kiss my cheek.

He was gone from me, then, and I stepped out from the house proper into the hall, lighting a candle. I didn’t truly need it, to see by, but I wanted some middle ground between this light and the morning air outside, even with the dark lenses over my eyes.

First, my dark spectacles, bought in Portobello Road so many years ago, now, coming quite into fashion once more with the young bucks of the new millennium, and then a scarf that I folded neatly over my nose and mouth, pinning it in place with a bobby pin on either side of my jaw. I, at least, could fare with the scarf, which was lightly scented, as my master was, with rosewater: the thousand odours that lingered in the air even in the nearest village, of strong-bodied fragrances, of diesel and petrol fumes, of all manner of chemical sand such forth, made me feel most light-headed and ill if I took them with nothing to mask my nose, but even with a scarf like this, Genesius was undone by them. Between those myriad fragrances, so strong as to threaten to burn out his nose and the roof of his mouth, and the cacophonous din of even a country village, in these strange times, he would be ever nauseated and liable to faint.

I took up a bottle of strong sun cream, rubbing it into the bared parts of my face before slipping it into my satchel, and then I drew on my gloves. Applying the stuff was the devil to one’s hands, and thus I no longer bothered – the cream came continuously away from the palms, rubbed away with one’s everyday movements, and became quite unmanageable. I had long-since learned to be dexterous indeed even with the calf’s leather clinging to my fingers, but these were not the modern gloves bought from the rack. These were old gloves, a favourite driving pair made without the little window on the back of hand, and they were tailored to my fingers. I knew not how people stood it, purchasing gloves that didn’t even fit them, and trying to get anything done…

Throwing my bag over my shoulder, I stepped out from the porch, and I winced slightly at the sudden glare of the sun, even as I leaned back to blow out my candle. It would be a relief, I thought, to come home in a few days’ time – it was the height of summer, the days bright and long, and I permitted myself a moment to adjust to the brightness of it all.

Once upon a time, perhaps I might have stood on a doorstep like this one, and known nothing of the world around me. Perhaps I might have smelt the humidity in the air, felt the light breeze, heard the rustle of leaves in the trees, and felt the heat, but that would have been all.

Now, I took in everything.

My nose was all but overwhelmed with the fragrances of the woods that surrounded the house on every side: leaves, leaves rotting, all manner of flowers in bloom, fruit on the trees, fruit that had grown overripe and dripped from its own skin or rotted upon the earth, squirrels and small rodents, foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, and there, yes, an adder, coiled in a fir—

And overpowering it all, the wild garlic, an awfully strong smell permeating the air that made my nose wrinkle in complaint, and I coughed. When I came home, I would cull the stuff back. Despite common mythologies, it does me no harm, and nor does it to my master, but the smell is so strong as to be rather a shock whenever one steps outside, as I imagine would be the same were we living beside a fishmonger.

Opening my eyes, I began the walk down the well-trodden path, stepping over the dry earth until I was a good few hundred feet from the house. We lived, veritably, in the middle of nowhere, and this was for the best – amidst all this protected forestry, we were away even from the country lanes, and certainly from the nearest motor carriageway.

I remember the last time the two of us were walking elsewhere, and a tractor rumbled past us – the stench of it was awful enough, a diesel taint that punched the back of our throats and bowled my master over, but this was years past, when engines were loud on top of being inefficient, and my master had dropped to his knees, clutching at his ears at the noise of it.

Some ways from the house, I kept a locked shed, and I drew a key from my pocket, unlocking the doors and drawing it open. Firstly, I opened the lead-lined chest at the side of the shed, removing my phone, and with only a slight wince, I held down the power button, bidding it to awaken once more as I set it on the shed’s top. It was only a small shed, its roof not higher than five feet: I kept my phone here with the bicycles, far from the house, and as my phone rebooted, I unbuckled my bicycle from its stand and took it down.

With great reluctance, then, I regarded my day’s punishment.

 _Helmets_.

I do hate them.

I see their need, of course, but without meaning to appear vain – vanity is not a privilege I often allow myself, except vicariously through my master’s appearance – I cannot bear the look of the things. It is impossible to appear dignified or attractive in a cyclist’s helmet, but then, I suppose one might say the same of someone with their brains half-dashed from their head.

It does no good explaining to the average gendarme that your skull is rather hardier than that of the average cyclist’s, and that you dislike the mess a helmet makes of your hair.

I put the damned thing on my head, and clipped it into place beneath my chin, then took up a pair of trouser clips and neatly hemmed in my trousers, that they not catch on the spokes of my velocipede as I rode. My phone, now roused, was not, as yet, going about its merry vibrations – it would not until I was further from the house, and turned it from its Airplane Mode.

You might think, as I suppose would be the assumption in these modern times, that it was all to do with being tracked and what-not, but it was merely a habit I had – I liked to remember to do it on the threshold of the wood, else I forgot to do it entirely, and as soon as my phone turned on it would vibrate with various missed messages before I was quite prepared. The vibrations, of course, were not half so bad as the myriad of ear-shattering chimes that might accompany it otherwise, but they were nonetheless grating.

Locking the shed back up and mounting my bicycle, ensuring all my knapsacks and the small trailer behind were in place, I rode on.

It was a long ride into the village – it was a half hour’s ride out of the woods the way that I rode it (certainly, another man shouldn’t be able to ride the track at all unless he were on one of these robust objects intended for mountainous terrains, and even then, not half so fast), and then it was a good hour and forty minutes over country roads before I reached the village of Newton.

It was a little place – a collection of cottages, a small shop that served also as the post office, a public house, and the office of Doctor Wilsden, a charming fellow of sympathetic disposition, who knew the precise nature of my master’s physiology and my own, and stocked what we might euphemistically name our medicine for us.

“Hello, Mark!” called the friendly voice of Mrs Farraday, who owned the only pub in Newton, the _Duck & Goat_, and I gave her a polite nod as I dismounted. “Will you be staying tonight?”

“Tonight and perhaps the next, Mrs Farraday, though I would hope circumstances would dictate only one.”

“And how’s your boyfriend?”

I was lucky, I supposed, that my sunglasses and scarf hid my wince at this phrasing every time. There were times, decades gone from us now, where one would look upon a man caring for another through his illness and assume them master and servant, or even assume them brothers, perhaps cousins. These modern expectations were—

Different.

“He is well, Mrs Farraday,” I said mildly.

“Oh, good,” she said, “poor thing, cooped up in that house all the time… I could always bring something out to you, you know, if you ever needed, you’d just need to give me a ring!” Mrs Farraday had been fishing for a specific address to our home for, it seemed to me now, a thousand years years, although I suppose it could not have been more than sixteen.

“My thanks, Mrs Farraday, but Gene is most sensitive to all manner of allergens. We must be careful.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs Farraday said, with a soft sigh. “Come into me when you’re ready, duck!”

“I shall,” I said, and chained my bicycle to the rack that adjoined the outer wall of the doctor’s office, then chaining the trailer to the spokes of the bicycle, that it not be disturbed. It was a sunny day, and it seemed to me that the sun beat down upon my shoulders, bidding me inside.

I stepped from the heat into Doctor Wilsden’s office, which was mercifully cool, but buzzed and rang with what seemed like a thousand electrical devices. Their high-frequency hum seemed to buzz upon my very nerves, and I sighed hard, rubbing at the side of my ear, although the action proffered no relief, as I knew it would not.

“Hello, Mark,” trilled Tilly Wilsden, who had been studying mathematics at university these past two years, and was, I was informed, serving as Doctor Wilsden’s receptionist for the summer. “Dad’s just finishing up with some paperwork, he’ll only be a tick.”

“Thank you, Tilly,” I said, and took a seat in the little office’s waiting room, taking my phone from my pocket and checking it through. There were no messages of especial importance – one or two texts from a few of the family, updating Genesius and I on their movements, and two emails from friends on the continent, but that was all.

One day, I knew, I would step out from the confines of our land and my phone would buzz ceaselessly in my palm: forwarded news stories, hundreds of updates, a time of crisis upon us… Sometimes, merely the thought of it made me want to toss the wretched device into the nearest ocean, but I knew well it would do naught to actually help, and would likely harm others, were we to go without news at all.

“Hello, Mark,” Doctor Wilsden rumbled from the doorway. He was a handsome man, stocky and dark-skinned, with a nose and jaw that many a sculptor had fought to portray, in his time. Being a country doctor suited him, I thought. “Come in.”

I rose, nodding to Tilly at the desk, and I followed him into his examining room. He closed shut the blinds with a neat movement, leaving us enveloped in darkness, and already, I noted, he had turned off those electrical devices that might be turned off, although it was a small difference to be made – I could hear the high hum of the devices in the rest of the building, and moreover, I could feel the thrum in the wires that ran beneath and over us, a constant current…

I drew the scarf from about my face, setting my glasses aside, and settled in the chair across from his desk, although he did not sit himself: he leaned back against the edge of his desk, looking down at me with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“How are you, Marcellus?” he asked. “How long’s it been since I saw you?”

“Two months,” I said quietly. “I am well, but for leaving the house. You know how little I like to.”

“And Genesius?”

“He is restless. He paces our rooms as a tiger might pace in its cage.”

“The cage door is open,” Wilsden said, although the charm in his voice grated rather than soothed. I was silent, exhaling quietly, and Wilsden shifted in his chair, affecting a serious expression. “I have something for you.”

Looking up, I took from his hands a soft item, made of some padded, meshed fabric, with some sort of plastic nozzle upon each side. Frowning at the object, I turned it over in my hands, regarding it with curiosity: it was a crescent-shaped section with straps at the back, mesh upon its outside, soft fabric on its inside.

“It’s a filter mask,” Wilsden supplied. “It’s made for those with severe allergies, or hypersensitivities of their own, although I thought it might be useful in your case, and especially in Genesius’. This one has been formulated with urban pollution in mind – you know, diesel and petrol fumes, stuff like that.”

“I see,” I said quietly, drawing my thumb over the fabric, and I drew it up to my face, testing it against my mouth, my nose. I was surprised by how neatly it fit the dimensions of my face, and when I turned a questioning gaze upon my physician, he gave me a smile.

“I ordered three with your measurements, and three with his. You know, with one of these masks and some earplugs, he might be able to come into the village, even out to one of the cities.”

“You would have my master rendered deaf?” I asked, unable to keep the affront from my voice, and Wilsden sighed, as was so often his way when we clashed on these subjects. At times, I wondered if perhaps he thought I kept his suggestions from my master, although this was certainly never the case.

“Better temporarily without his hearing than forcibly deafened,” Wilsden said. “Others of his age _do_ fare well, you know. Marduk lives in London now. He plugs his ears and has air filters in his lodgings, with heavy insulation in his resting rooms that he might sleep.”

“Genesius abhors Marduk and thinks him a scoundrel,” I said, “as well you know.”

“Well, we all hate our contemporaries in one way or another,” Wilsden said. “He’s merely an example.”

“It isn’t the _sound_ ,” I said. “It’s the vibration, the frequency, that renders him quite so ill, and I’ve _told_ him, Doctor, please do not think me encouraging him to wallow in his state, but I so hate to see him in pain, and it does give him pain, as you are aware, it puts him in such throes of agony, and I…” My voice, a traitor to me, trailed off into the ether: not once did Wilsden’s gaze, quietly expectant, sitting in judgement, waver from my own. I sighed, and murmured, “I will bring this back to him.”

“There’s one other thing,” Wilsden said.

“Oh?”

Wilden reached back, and he took from his desk a copy of the local newspaper, which he pressed into my hands. The page he wished to draw my attention to had been neatly marked, and I took it in with a sort of desperate horror, unable to control the stiff upset that I knew marred my expression.

“You own the land the house is on, and I believe the stretch of the acre on each side,” Wilsden said, his voice filtering into my ears as if through some great expanse of water, “but not the wood itself. You could protest it, but you’re just two men, and they seem to have taken in a lot of environmental concerns already…”

I imagined the lake water on my every side, an inexorable pressure upon my every inch of skin, and I pictured my own hair – so long as it had been at that time, longer than it is now, as was the fashion – swirling about my head as the branches of the willow tree had. I had felt so small in that moment, so momentously tiny, beneath the weight of infinity, and that was how I felt now.

“What—”

My voice faltered, breaking in the middle, and I tore my gaze away from the badly-printed image alongside the story, captioned, “ _Similar logging operations are underway outside Woodside_.”

“What would you suggest?”

“These operations aren’t due to start for another six months,” Wilsden said quietly, his voice sympathetic now, soft. “They’ll start out building a road through the wood, that’ll take a while, and then they’ll start marking some trees for—”

“I understand the process,” I said, more archly than was my intent. “These things have changed little, even with the centuries. The method remains the same: it is only the tools and extent that have changed.”

“Even if it wasn’t for this,” Wilsden said, “I’d still have said the same, Marcellus. Like you said, Genesius isn’t meant to be locked up like this, and nor are you.”

“The logging operations oughtn’t take long—”

“Years. And after that, a new road is going to be cut straight through, a main road.” I stared into the middle distance between us. I felt my heart, so slow-beating as to appear to some as still, beat slightly faster in my chest. “How long have you been in that house now?”

“Ninety-nine years,” I said. “Come September.”

“Jesus,” Wilsden muttered. “And when did you last have a houseguest?”

“A long time past,” I murmured. “He gets…”

“I know how he gets,” Wilsden said. “Marcellus, it’s been—”

“I know how long it’s been.”

“You’re not his servant anymore,” Wilsden went on, ignoring me. “It’s one thing for him, if he wants to do that to himself, but _you_ — You should have some freedom, while you can.”

“I am old enough, five times over, to be your father,” I reminded him, with milder tone than I felt like employing in the moment, but it was gauche indeed to quarrel at volume with one’s physician, no matter his notions. “I do wish you would cease treating me as some young boy in your charge.”

“Sorry,” he said: his tone was low, and I heard in his voice that he meant it. “But the world isn’t going to be reduced to rubble any time soon, no matter what Genesius wants. You’re going to have to adapt, somehow.”

“Or move north,” I said quietly. “In snowier climes, perhaps for we can withstand temperatures that—”

“And do what?” Wilsden asked. “Eat what?”0

I was silent.

I was worn away beneath the implacable force of Doctor Wilsden’s logic, as a stone is worn to sand by the quiet, delicate flow of a mountain stream. Not heavy, not loud, not rushing, and yet inevitable.

“We’re social animals, Marcellus,” Wilsden said. “It isn’t right for the two of you to lock yourselves away from the world, speaking to nobody, but up in the snow, it’d be worse. You’d go mad. And in any case, it would only be temporary – it’s all melting, and the world expands outward and outward. Civilisation, they call it.”

I wrinkled my nose. “May I take this?” I asked, holding up the newspaper.

He nodded, and said, “I have your delivery ready already, in the fridges. Two months’ supply, for the two of you.”

“My thanks.”

“Why don’t we join you for dinner one night?” Wilsden asked. “Me, Jeanette, Tilly, Max…”

“I have invited you in the past,” I said. “A dozen times, you’ve declined.”

“Well, this time, I’m offering,” Wilsden said, offering his hand. I took it.

“Very well, Antoine,” I murmured. “Later this month, perhaps.”

When I left the doctor’s office, I dialled the number of our supplier, for the bulk of our groceries. The majority of our fresh meats were hunted in the wood – pheasant and other manner of fowl, the occasional hedgehog when each of us was of the mood, and fish from the river, although in recent years, those populations had dwindled.

We had kept chickens, once upon a time, and goats. That was so long ago – when last did we keep livestock of our own? A long time since, it was, and yet readily I missed it: I so missed the quiet companionship of such animals to hand, although upon my master, I believe it wore thin, when this was all he might have instead of the companionship of other people.

Our groceries would be delivered to their usual place – another small shed along a lane nearby to the turning toward our home, always neatly locked, which my deliveryman had a key to. We would get them come evening time, and I would organise his payment whilst I was here in the village.

“Oh, Mark!” said a familiar voice, and I turned to regard the Reverend Rebecca Hamish, who clasped hold of my gloved hand as soon as I faced her, and I smiled politely as she shook it forcefully. Her parish stretched out to the village, but her chapel was some ways away, and I examined her thoughtfully.

“Reverend,” I said. “What brings you to the village?”

“Oh, old Mrs Fenton finally kicked the bucket,” she said cheerfully. She did not mean, I do not believe, to be especially callous: the woman was possessed of an easy contentment that came from being bathed in the exalted light of God – or so I am informed – and she treated even the worst of atrocities with a sort of light-hearted bliss, for this too would pass, and surely there remained a silver lining even in the darkest of storm clouds. I have noted, also, the tendency of country peoples, used as they are to nature’s rule in their farmyards and their fields, to be less squeamish over the subject of death than those of the city, so perhaps this, too, contributed to her easy tones. “I just wanted to ask if you and your, er, well…”

Here, the Reverend’s ease faltered. The sublime could not, it seemed, overpass some elements of her natural conservatism – her awkwardness in referring to my master, I believe, grates on me even more than the average denizen of the village calling him, with such ease, my _partner_ , or _boyfriend_. She drew yet more attention to the connection that was not there in her uncertainty, stumbling over it and falling into the thicket of my own complicated thought.

“Well,” she rallied, grinning with uneven, yellowed teeth. I liked her smile. It was kind, no matter what else. It was the barest flicker of sunshine, cutting through the torrential pressure under which I felt I was drowning. So much did I have to explain to my master upon my return, so much, and yet here was the Reverend: always smiling, bright-eyed, short-sighted in her way, but not unkind for it. “Will you sign our petition?”

“To whom are you petitioning?”

“The council, of course! What with this new logging operation—”

“Oh,” I said, tasting ashes upon my tongue, and gave a neat inclination of my head. I felt as though I were floating, breathless, my voice hoarse when next I spoke. “Have you a pen?”

She drew from her robes a clipboard and a cheap ball-point, and although my body rebelled to hold the thing in my gloved hand – even through the light leather I felt the hard edges of the plastic digging into the sides of my fingers, and it wrote so roughly without free-flowing ink – I signed my name upon the page, leaving my address as Post Restante, Newton. How many signatures had I had, throughout my years? I knew not. It all seemed to change so quickly, and yet, so slowly too.

“Thank you, Reverend,” I said. With a voice that quavered, I asked, “Do you believe your efforts will succeed?”

“Who knows?” she said, shrugging her shoulders, and clapping me hard upon the arm. I do not bruise easily, for my flesh is thick and tough, and yet I wondered, in the moment, if she had left a blemish in the flesh. I should have appreciated it, I think, if it had. “See you, Mark!”

“See you,” I echoed, disliking the farewell for the promise it required of me, and walked onto the post office.

To my surprise, there was more awaiting us here than the receipt for our water bill (which was always some negligent sum, as we preferred to get most of our water from the river) and our council tax, both of which paid by my man in the city from our accounts.

“Beautiful envelopes,” said the girl behind the desk – the daughter of the Abduls, the youngest, Lupe. She was of a romantic lilt, and she sighed softly as she regarded the heavy paper stock of the parchment. “And they’ve such nice handwriting too, Mr Ricci. Where do you get all these friends?”

She was a swimmer, was young Lupe: photographs of her were displayed proudly upon the wall at the entrance, of the girl in her black swimsuit, her veil made of some new fabric of which I knew not the name, but that she might swim with so easily. Once, when she was seventeen, merely because she had asked me, I accompanied her family to the town, and watched her win every race in which she swam. The chlorine stung my eyes, and when I finally returned home, I was exhausted, my eyes dry, my nose sore and bleeding from the force of the bleach, but I had felt such joy, such warmth to be included in it… And yet, I had gone not for myself, but for Genesius. I took a great many photographs for him, of those moments of joy, that she won—

“Much of the time, Lupe, I do my best to get rid of them,” I said, smiling when she laughed, and I flicked through them, recognising the handwriting and making a mental note of who had written us. This was Doctor Wilsden’s doing, undoubtedly – he had spread the word about the forestry operation, and mentioned, perhaps, that we might soon have to leave our home, that we would need allies in our movements.

I sighed. “You know, it is true what they say, Lupe,” I murmured. I felt so awash with emotion, as if I was full to the brim with some dark liquid – as though I were drowning, in feeling alone. I ached with it. I yearned for when times were simpler; I turned my head from the bright glare of the future, for it blinded my eyes.

Every device in the room seemed to pulse within my head: a car moved outside, and it felt like a thunderclap; I heard the quiet electrical hum of the tills, the computers, the lights, and it all served to weight me down further, send me down, down…

“What’s that, Mr Ricci?”

“All things must end.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, and she looked at me, her lips down turning at their edges. “Bad news?”

“I must go home.”

“Don’t you usually spend a few days in the village, Mr—”

“Farewell, Lupe. Do pass my regards on to your mother.”

“Yes, Mr Ricci, I will.”

Antoine knew my movements, my psychology, as well as any other: when I walked across the way to the doctor’s office, our medicine was already in Tilly’s arms, wrapped in a dark cloth, and I took it out to my bicycle.

My ride home was agony.

It was no physical exertion for me, though I rode faster than I had in the longest of times with the high thrum of the bike’s spinning chain in my ears, but my eyes stung with unshed tears, and my usual calm was being disturbed with every thought that came to me, each one chipping away at my usual decorum. My hands trembled upon the handles of my bicycle, and my tears caught slick at the bottom edge of my glasses before they ran further, down my cheeks.

I didn’t lock up my bicycle. I turned off my phone and threw it with a clatter down to the ground beneath the shed, and I ran so quickly as I ever had up toward the house, shedding my clothes as soon as I was within the safety of the clearing, ignoring the stinging bite of the little pieces of sunshine that peeked through the canopy overhead. My sunglasses, my scarf, it all hit the ground, so that as I crossed the threshold of the entrance hall I was naked, and quickly I scrubbed the petrol-stink from the flesh, rinsing too my hair with the rosewater.

Here was the only baptism I had ever had that mattered.

“Genesius!” I called as I stumbled into the house proper, still damp, still dripping.

In a moment he was before me, and in the darkness we stared at one another.

“Marcellus?” he asked, moving forward with his face a mask of wretched concern, his arms reaching for me: as soon as his hands touched my skin I dissolved anew, and caught the back of his neck that I might draw him down. Once, a kiss between men was nothing, and how well I remembered those days; once another time, a kiss upon the mouth was a humiliation, a degradation; once, it was benediction, and how all things changed. In all the time I have lived, it seems as if everything has been everything, at least once, and all these fast-moving, fast-dying people forget it. Why shouldn’t I forget it, now? Why shouldn’t a kiss be everything?

Now, I kissed him, and it felt like a dive from some impossible clifftop, far, far below into the water that awaited us. For just a moment, a heart-stopping eternity, his mouth was still beneath my own, his form frozen.

And then he kissed me back, and it was a torrent.

I know not for how long we embraced. Time seemed to drip down about our shoulders like so much drizzling rain, unheeded, and I poured into his mouth all the love I had ever felt for him, for anything, for everything, so much so that I should have been empty, if not for the fact that he did the same in turn.

“Something dreadful,” he whispered against my lips, his fingers tangled in my hair, our noses brushing against one another, “has happened.”

“Yes,” I said.

“An ending?”

“Yes,” I said, and explained.

“This is dire,” he murmured, when all had tumbled from my lips in one long, agonising stream. We were seated now upon the wood floor of our hallway, his great back against the edge of the stair’s bannister, I between his legs in my puddle of rosewater. My head, heavy with all my day’s agonies, rested upon his chest, and soaked his blouse. “Long has been the time since we could move so easily: no matter what modern convenience might be afforded us, I fear to leave this place, to move onward, into the sun, the sound, the awful desert of the world that surrounds us outside this wood. My heart aches, yearns, for my solitude and my books. I thrill with terror, Marcellus, at the idea of being out in all that muck, all that cacophony. I should be choked by it: I shall drown in it.”

“I’ll drown with you,” I promised him, and he pressed his face against my hair, clutching at me: I clutched at him in return, grasping him more tightly than I had ever dared to hold another, than I ever would dare. “Did I ever tell you, Genesius, of the willow tree where I grew up?”

“No,” he said. “Will you? The distraction would no doubt calm me, and I so love to hear your voice.”

The sun was setting now. Even as we were, suspended in our sea of darkness on every side, holding onto one another, we each could feel it outside, feel the night draw in. Soon, I would have to stand, collect my clothes, get our medicine, put my bicycle away properly, bring in our post, make my apologies over the phone… But not yet. Soon, our world would burn and shatter about us: the dam would break, and our home together would be drowned, inevitably, as that willow tree was, by time’s inevitable flow. But not yet.

Not yet, not yet.

“Yes,” I said softly, and I told him all.

**END**

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also on Medium [here!](https://medium.com/kuroda-antiques/in-perpetuity-38f33a384325?postPublishedType=initial)
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I'd love some feedback on my original work if you're keeping up with it, and there's [a little Google form here](https://forms.gle/LdUkXFkrTs6YFxxKA). I'm also to be found on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DictionaryWrite), [Tumblr](https://patricianandclerk.tumblr.com/), and [Medium!](https://medium.com/kuroda-antiques)


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